THE ECONOMICAL POSITION OF THE YEOMANRY. 743 



in which these thriving freeholders lived during the fifteenth 

 century. But it is manifest that they need not have denied them- 

 selves many of those luxuries which they certainly did not indulge 

 in a century later. Then they were undoubtedly thrifty, and 

 probably lived in the plainest possible manner ; for in a time 

 when the extraordinary necessities of government had no other 

 practicable resource, except direct taxation on visible property, 

 there would be every temptation to avoid the appearance of 

 opulence. Accumulations of wealth from agriculture, especially 

 when agriculture is unprogressive, are very slow, and may be 

 easily concealed under a penurious mode of life 1 , and competi- 

 tion for occupancy, was, I am persuaded, almost unknown. 



Progressive agriculture is in many ways a cause of public 

 wealth. It gives opportunity for engaging an increasing section 

 of the community in other industrial pursuits. It stimulates 

 foreign trade by the exportation of surplus produce, and en- 

 larges the market for home products by the increase of popula- 

 tion. But the agriculture of the sixteenth century made no 

 progress. The cultivation of the soil was still on the system of 

 Walter de Henley and Fitzherbert. Only one new article, the 

 hop, was introduced into English agriculture, and the cultivation 

 of the hop was, at least in the first instance, supposed to be 

 mischievous, and was denounced or dreaded. 



Nor does the poverty of the revenue and the decline of tax- 

 paying resources prove much. It is very hard to extract a 

 revenue from a purely agricultural community, which has few 

 manufactures and a narrow foreign trade. However much 

 philanthropists may regret it, the chief hopes of the financier 

 and the most fruitful sources of revenue depend on the power 

 which a community has of spending its means upon articles 

 of voluntary consumption, and especially on those articles 

 which a great many people now think that the consumer 



1 It may serve as an illustration of the inelasticity of competition rents that, as late 

 as the Restoration, quit-rents or fee farm rents were a favourite form of investing 

 charitable donations or devises. Had farm rents shown symptoms of progress they 

 would have been preferred, as they were in the next generation. 



